Trivia / Reba McEntire

• Ability over Appearance: The Carnegie Hall concert version of South Pacific cast Reba as leading lady Nellie Forbush, which raised a fair few eyebrows among theatre fans, to say the least — particularly since she was over 50 at the time. Most of those fans promptly shut up after they saw that the wide-eyed, idealistic, youthful spirit she brought to the role was perfect for Nellie.
• Actor Allusion: The video for "Every Other Weekend" stars Steve Howey and JoAnna Garcia Swisher as the divorced couple being sung about. They played Reba's son-in-law and daughter in Reba.
  • The latter half of the second verse, "Grilled cheese, and cut the crusts off/'But that's not the way Mom makes it, Daddy' breaks my heart" is lifted directly from the B-plot of a season one episode of the show, between Reba's ex and their seven-year-old.
• Breakthrough Hit: 1980's "You Lift Me Up to Heaven," if you consider her solo releases. But of the countless artists she's recorded with through the years (ranging from Vince Gill to Kelly Clarkson), it was a Texas-based country singer and 1970s hit-maker named Jacky Ward who, two years earlier, got her into the top 20 of the Hot Country Singles chart for the first time, with a duet ditty called "Three Sheets in the Wind." Ward is largely forgotten today; McEntire would go on to her Hall of Fame career and become an influence to countless female artists in nearly every genre.
• Chart Displacement: Although she has the most #1 country hits of any female artist, many of her most famous songs such as "Fancy", "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia", "She Thinks His Name Was John", "I'm a Survivor", etc. aren't among them (although it's likely justified in the cases of "Fancy", "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia", and "She Thinks His Name Was John", as their darker themes may have made some stations reluctant to play the songs at all). Also, her highest Hot 100 entry is the now very obscure "What Do You Say", while her longest-lasting #1 was "Consider Me Gone", which came in 2008, long after her peak period.
• Creator Breakdown: The very bleak (but awesome) For My Broken Heart was released after Reba lost most of her band in an airplane crash.
  • One of said band members was Chris Austin, who released a few singles for Warner Bros. in the late 1980s and co-wrote Ricky Skaggs' 1991 hit "Same Ol' Love".
• Creator Couple: Until 2015, she was married to her longtime manager, Narvel Blackstock. They have continued to work together after splitting.
• The Danza: In both Reba and Malibu Country, she takes Reba as a first name (last name Hart in the former, Gallagher in the latter).
• Executive Meddling: "Somebody" got to #1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs entirely due to a chart manipulation scheme where several stations played the song multiple times per hour in the dead of night in order to inflate its airplay totals. After the same thing happened to Terri Clark's "Girls Lie Too" a few weeks later, Billboard overhauled its chart methodologies to make them harder to manipulate.
• Follow-Up Failure:
  • The #2 "Because of You" with Kelly Clarkson was followed up by "The Only Promise That Remains", a Justin Timberlake duet that became her first single since 1978 not to make the country charts at all (although it did make the Bubbling Under Hot 100 from downloads). This was due in part to country stations spinning "Every Other Weekend" instead.
  • Her 2010 chart-topper "Turn On the Radio" was followed by her poorly-received cover of "If I Were a Boy", which stalled out at #22.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: "What If", her 1997 charity single for the Salvation Army, was only ever available as a standalone single.
• She Also Did: Sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" at WWE WrestleMania VIII, April 5, 1992. Commentator Bobby "The Brain" Heenan jokingly referred to her as "El Matador's cousin, Arriba McEntire," a reference to Tito Santana's Catchphrase "Arriba."
• Technology Marches On:
  • "Why Haven't I Heard From You" suffers from this, since a good portion of the song is bragging about the best phone technology 1994 has to offer. The worst is probably the line about how there's one on every corner, since payphones have been quickly disappearing since the rise of cell phones.
  • The video for "Is There Life Out There," where Maggie panics because her daughter spills coffee on a paper she wrote for a college class. Why does she panic? Because she wrote it on a typewriter. Her husband dries it out with a hairdryer so she can still hand it in. This conflict is entirely irrelevant with the advent of computers.
• Uncredited Role:
  • "On My Own" featured guest vocals from Martina McBride, Trisha Yearwood, and Linda Davis, but only McEntire was credited on the charts.
  • "Every Other Weekend". The album version had Kenny Chesney as a duet partner, but since her label couldn't reach an agreement with his, the single version had Skip Ewing singing his part instead. Most stations played the Chesney version anyway, even before it was confirmed as a single. As a result, it was credited to Reba and Kenny for the first few weeks it was on the chart before its release, then to "Reba McEntire with Kenny Chesney or Skip Ewing" for one week, then just Reba for the rest of its chart run.
• What Could Have Been:
  • She was originally tapped to record "Goodbye Time", but she felt the lyrics too closely paralleled her own then-recent divorce, so it went to Conway Twitty instead.
  • "For My Broken Heart" was originally going to be a duet with Clint Black, but he was unavailable at the time.
  • "Does He Love You": Reba had wanted to cut the song since the mid-1980s after other notables such as Liza Minnelli and Barbara Mandrell had turned it down. The song was written as a two-woman duet, and she wanted the second part to go to Linda Davis. At the time, Davis had just ended her contract with Epic Records and was singing backup in her road band. However, label executives wanted her to sing it with Wynonna Judd or Trisha Yearwood, since they were more recognizable names and on the same label. Reba's Record Producer Tony Brown suggested that she submit a demo to Wynonna, since he was also producing for her at the time; when she turned it down, Reba got her way.
  • "The Heart Won't Lie": Kim Carnes wrote the song with the intent of recording it as a duet with Kenny Rogers. However, he bumped it from the intended album because he already had a female duet. Rogers then intended to record the song with Reba, but they couldn't make it work due to their vocal ranges being too far apart. Reba then asked if she could record the song by herself, but Brown suggested that since they had already brought in Vince Gill to sing backing vocals on the song, that they might as well make it a duet as it was originally written. The result? A #1 smash for both artists.

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